Chapter 12
After eleven years in power and having won three general elections, the British Prime Minister actually fell on November 20, although she did not announce her decision to resign until two days later. Her fall from power was triggered by an obscure rule in the Conservative Party constitution requiring her nominal reelection as Party leader at periodic intervals. Such an interval occurred that November.
Her reelection should have been just a formality, until an out-of-office former minister chose to run against her. Unaware of her danger, she hardly took the challenge seriously, conducting a lackluster campaign and actually attending a conference in Paris on the day of the vote.
Behind her back a range of old resentments, affronted egos, and nervous fears that she might even lose the forthcoming general election coalesced into an alliance against her, preventing her from being swept back into the Party leadership on the first ballot. Had she been so returned, there would have been no second ballot, and the challenger would have disappeared into obscurity.
In the ballot of November 20 she needed a two-thirds majority; she was just four votes short, forcing a runoff second ballot. Within hours, what had started as a few dislodged stones tumbling down a hill became a landslide. After consulting her Cabinet, who told her she would now lose, she resigned.
To head off the challenger, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major, ran for the top job and won.
The news stunned the soldiers in the Gulf, American and British alike. Down in Oman, American fighter pilots who were now consorting daily with SAS men from the nearby base asked the British what was going on and received helpless shrugs in return.
Mike Martin heard the news when the Iraqi chauffeur swaggered over and told him.
Martin contemplated the news, looked blank, and asked: "Who is she?"
"Fool," snapped the chauffeur. "The leader of the Beni Naji. Now we will win."
He went back to his car to resume listening to Baghdad radio.
In a few moments First Secretary Kulikov hurried from the house and was driven straight back to his embassy. That night, Martin sent a long transmission to Riyadh, containing the latest batch of answers from Jericho and an added request from himself for further instructions.
Crouched by the doorway of his shack to ward off any intruders, for the satellite dish was positioned in the doorway facing south, Martin waited for his reply. A low, pulsing light on the console of the small transceiver told him at half past one in the morning that he had his reply.
He dismantled the dish, stored it back beneath the floor with the batteries and transceiver, slowed down the message, and listened to it play back. There was a fresh list of demands for information from Jericho and an agreement to the agent's last demand for money, which had now been transferred into his account.
In under a month the renegade on the Revolutionary Command Council had earned over a million dollars.
Added to the list were two further instructions for Martin. The first was to send Jericho a message, not in the form of a question, that it was hoped he could somehow filter into the thinking of the planners in Baghdad. It was to the effect that the news from London probably meant that the Coalition action to recover Kuwait would be called off if the Rais stood firm.
Whether this disinformation reached the highest councils of Baghdad will never be known, but within a week Saddam Hussein had claimed that the toppling of Thatcher was due to the revulsion of the British people at her opposition to him.
The final instruction on Mike Martin's tape that night was to ask Jericho if he had ever heard of a weapon or weapon system referred to as the Fist of God.
By the light of a candle, Martin spent most of the rest of the night writing the questions in Arabic onto two sheets of thin airmail paper. Within twenty hours, the papers had been secreted behind the loose brick in the wall close to the Imam Aladham shrine in Aadhamiya.
It took a week for the answers to come back. Martin read the spidery Arabic script of Jericho's handwriting and translated everything into English. From a soldier's point of view, it was interesting.
The three Republican Guard divisions facing the British and Americans along the border, the Tawakkulna and Medina, now joined by the Hammurabi, were equipped with a mix of T-54/55, T-62, and T- 72 main battle tanks, all three Russian.
But on a recent tour, Jericho continued, General Abdullah Kadiri of the Armored Corps had discovered to his horror that most of the crews had removed their batteries and used them to power fans, cookers, radios, and cassette players. It was doubtful if, in combat conditions, any of them would now start. There had been several executions on the spot, and two senior commanders had been relieved and sent home.
Saddam's half-brother, Ali Hassan Majid, now Governor-General of Kuwait, had reported that the occupation was becoming a nightmare, with attacks on Iraqi soldiers still unquenchable and desertions rising. The resistance showed no signs of abating, despite vigorous interrogations and numerous executions by Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM and two personal visits by his boss, Omar Khatib. Worse, the resistance had now somehow acquired the plastic explosive called Semtex, which is much more powerful than industrial dynamite.
Jericho had identified two more major military command posts, both constructed in subterranean caverns and invisible from the air. The thinking in the immediate circle around Saddam Hussein was definitely that a seminal contribution to the fall of Margaret Thatcher had been his own influence. He had twice reiterated his absolute refusal even to consider pulling out of Kuwait.
Finally, Jericho had never heard of anything code-named the Fist of God but would listen for such a phrase. Personally, he doubted there existed any weapon or weapon system unknown to the Allies.
Martin read the entire message onto tape, speeded it up, and transmitted it. In Riyadh it was seized upon avidly and the radio technicians logged its time of arrival: 2355 hours, November 30, 1990.
Leila Al-Hilla came out of the bathroom slowly, pausing in the doorway with the light behind her to raise her arms to the doorframe on each side and pose for a moment. The bathroom light, shining through the negligee, showed off her ripe and voluptuous silhouette to full advantage.
It should; it was black, of the sheerest lace, and had cost a small fortune, a Paris import acquired from a boutique in Beirut. The big man on the bed stared hungrily, ran a furred tongue along a thick lower lip, and grinned.
Leila liked to dawdle in the bathroom before a session of sex. There were places to be washed and anointed, eyes to be accentuated with mascara, lips to be etched in red, and perfumes to be applied, different aromas for different parts of her body.
It was a good body at thirty summers, the sort clients liked: not fat, but well-curved where it ought to be, full-hipped and breasted, with muscle beneath the curves.
She lowered her arms and advanced toward the dim-lit bed, swinging her hips, the high-heeled shoes adding four inches to her height and exaggerating the hip-swing.
But the man on the bed, on his back and naked, covered like a bear in black fur from chin to ankles, had closed his eyes.
Don't go to sleep on me now, you oaf, she thought, not tonight when I need you. Leila sat on the side of the bed and ran sharp red fingernails up through the hair of the belly to the chest, tweaked each nipple hard, then ran her hand back again, beyond the stomach to the groin. She leaned forward and kissed the man on the lips, her tongue prying an opening. But the man's lips responded halfheartedly, and she caught the strong odor of arak.
Drunk again, she thought--why can't the fool stay off the stuff. Still, it had its advantages, that bottle of arak every evening. Oh well, to work.
Leila Al-Hilla was a good courtesan, and she knew it. The best in the Middle East, some said, and certainly among the most expensive. She had trained years ago, as a child, in a very private academy in Lebanon where the sexual wiles and tricks of the ouled-nails of Morocco, of the nautch girls of India, and the subtle technocrats of Fukutomi-cho were practiced by the older girls while the children watched and learned.
After fifteen years as a professional on her own, she knew that ninety percent of the skill of a good whore had nothing to do with the problem of coping with insatiable virility. That was for porn magazines and films. Her talent was to flatter, compliment, praise, and indulge, but mainly to elicit a real male erection out of an endless succession of jaded appetites and faded powers.
She ran her probing hand out of the groin and felt the man's penis. Sighed inwardly. Soft as a marshmallow. General Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the Armored Corps of the Army of the Republic of Iraq, was going to need a little encouraging this evening.
From beneath the bed where she had secreted it earlier, she took a soft cloth bag and tipped its contents onto the sheet beside her. Smearing her fingers with a thick, creamy jelly, she lubricated a medium-size dildo-vibrator, lifted one of the general's thighs, and slipped it expertly into his anus.
General Kadiri grunted, opened his eyes, glanced down at the naked woman crouching beside his genitals, and grinned again, the teeth flashing beneath the thick black moustache.
Leila pressed the disk on the base of the vibrator, and the insistent
pulsing throb began to fill the general's lower body. Beneath her hand the woman felt the limp organ begin to swell. From a flask with a tube sticking through the seal she half-filled her mouth with a swig of tasteless, odorless petroleum jelly, then leaned forward and took the man's stirring penis into her mouth.
The combination of the oily smoothness of the jelly and rapid probing of her skillful pointed tongue began to have an effect. For ten minutes, until her jaw ached, she caressed and sucked until the general's erection was as good as it was ever going to be.
Before he could lose it, she lifted her head, swung an ample thigh across him, inserted him into her, and settled across his hips. She had felt bigger and better ones, but it was working--just. Leila leaned forward and swung her breasts over his face. "Ah, my big strong black bear," she cooed, "you are superb, as ever." He smiled up at her.
She began to rise and settle, not too fast, rising until the helmet was just still between the labia, settling slowly until she had enveloped everything he had. As she moved, she used developed and practiced vaginal muscles to grip and squeeze, relax, grip and squeeze. She knew the effect of the double incitement.
General Kadiri began to grunt and then shout, short harsh cries forced out of him by the sensation of the deep pulsing throb in his sphincter area and the woman rising and falling on his shaft with steadily increasing rhythm. "Yes, yes, oh yes, this is so good, keep going, darling," she panted into his face until finally he had his orgasm.
While he climaxed into her hips, Leila straightened her torso, towering over him, jerking in spasm, screaming with pleasure, faking her own tremendous climax.
When he was spent, he deflated at once and in seconds she had removed herself and his dildo, tossing it to one side lest he fall asleep too soon. That was the last thing she wanted after all her hard work. There was yet more work to do.
So she lay beside him and drew the sheet over them both, propping herself on one elbow, letting her bosom press against the side of his face, smoothing his hair and stroking his cheek with her free right hand. "Poor bear," she murmured. "Are you very tired? You work too hard, my magnificent lover. They work you too hard. What was it today, eh? More problems on the Council, and always you who has to solve them? Mmmmmm? Tell Leila, you know you can tell little Leila." So before he slept, he did.
Later, when General Kadiri was snoring away the effects of arak and sex, Leila retired to the bathroom where, with the door locked and seated on the toilet with a tray across her lap, she noted everything down in a neat, crabbed Arabic script.
Later still, in the morning, the sheets of flimsy paper rolled into a hollowed-out tampon to avoid the security checks, she would hand it over to the man who paid her. It was dangerous, she knew, but it was lucrative, double earnings for the same job, and one day she intended to be rich--rich enough to leave Iraq forever and set up her own academy, perhaps in Tangier, with a string of nice girls to sleep with and Moroccan houseboys to whip whenever she felt the need.
If Gidi Barzilai had been frustrated by the security procedures of the Winkler Bank, two weeks of trailing Wolfgang Gemuetlich were driving him to distraction. The man was impossible.
After the spotter's identification, Gemuetlich had quickly been followed to his house out beyond the Prater Park. The next day, while he was at work, the yarid team had watched the house until Frau Gemuetlich left to go shopping. The girl member of the team went after her, staying in touch with her colleagues by personal radio so that she could warn them of the lady's return. In fact, the banker's wife was away for two hours--more than ample time.
The break-in by the neviot experts was no problem, and bugs were quickly planted in sitting room, bedroom, and telephone. The search--quick, skilled, and leaving no trace--yielded nothing.
There were the usual papers: deeds to the house, passports, birth certificates, marriage license, even a series of bank statements. Everything was photographed, but a glance at the private bank account revealed no evidence of embezzlement from the Winkler Bank--there was even a horrible chance that the man would turn out to be completely honest.
The wardrobe and bedroom drawers revealed no sign of bizarre personal habits--always a good blackmail lever among the respectable middle classes--and indeed the neviot team leader, having watched Frau Gemuetlich leave the house, was not surprised. If the man's personal secretary was a mousy little thing, his wife was like a scrap of discarded paper. The Israeli thought he had seldom seen such a downcast little shrimp.
By the time the yarid girl came on the radio with a muttered warning that the banker's wife was heading home, the neviot break-in experts were finished and out. The front door was relocked by the man in the telephone company uniform after the rest had scuttled out the back and through the garden.
From then on, the neviot team would man the tape recorders in the van down the street to listen to the goings-on inside the house. Two weeks later a despairing team leader told Barzilai they had hardly filled one tape.
On the first evening they had recorded eighteen words. She had said: "Here's your dinner, Wolfgang" --no reply. She had asked for new curtains--refused. He had said, "Early day tomorrow, I'm off to bed."
"He says it every bloody night, it's like he's been saying it for thirty years," complained the neviot man.
"Any sex?" asked Barzilai. "You must be joking, Gidi. They don't even talk, let alone screw."
All other leads to a flaw in the character of Wolfgang Gemuetlich came up zero. There was no gambling, no small boys, no socializing, no nightclubbing, no mistress, no scuttling through the red-light district.
On one occasion he left the house, and the spirits of the trailing team rose. Gemuetlich was in a dark coat and hat, on foot, after dark and after supper, moving through the darkened suburb until he came to a private house five blocks away. He knocked and waited. The door opened, he was admitted, and it closed. Soon a ground-floor light came on, behind heavy drapes.
Before the door closed, one of the Israeli watchers caught a glimpse of a grim-looking woman in a white nylon tunic. Aesthetic baths, perhaps? Assisted showers, mixed sauna with two hefty wenches to handle the birch twigs?
A check the next morning revealed that the woman in the tunic was an elderly chiropodist who ran a small practice from her own home. Wolfgang Gemuetlich had been having his corns trimmed.
On the first of December, Gidi Barzilai received a rocket from Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. This was not an operation without a limit of time, he was warned. The United Nations had given Iraq till January 16 to get out of Kuwait. After that, there would be war. Anything might happen. Get on with it.
"Gidi, we can follow this bastard till hell freezes over," the two team leaders told their controller. "There's just no dirt in his life. I don't understand the bastard. Nothing--he does nothing we can use on him."
Barzilai was in a dilemma. They could kidnap the wife and threaten the husband that he had better cooperate or else. ... Trouble was, the sleaze would trade her in rather than steal a luncheon voucher. Worse, he would call the cops.
They could kidnap Gemuetlich and work him over. The trouble there was, the man would have to go back to the bank to make the transfer to close down the Jericho account. Once inside the bank, he'd yell blue murder.
Kobi Dror had said, no miss and no traces. "Let's switch to the secretary," Barzilai said. "Confidential secretaries often know everything their boss knows."
So the two teams switched their attentions to the equally dull-looking Fr鋟lein Edith Hardenberg. She took even less time, just ten days. They tailed her to her home, a small apartment in a staid old house just off Trautenauplatz far out in the Nineteenth District, the northwestern suburb of Grinzing. She lived alone. No lover, no boyfriend, not even a pet.
A search of her private papers revealed a modest bank account, a mother in retirement in Salzburg. The apartment itself had once been rented by the mother, as the rent book showed, but the daughter had moved in seven years earlier when the mother returned to her native Salzburg.
Edith drove a small Seat car, which she parked on the street outside the flat, but she mainly commuted to work by public transportation, no doubt due to the parking difficulties in the city center. Her pay stubs revealed a stingy salary--"mean bastards," exploded the neviot searcher when he saw the sum--and her birth certificate revealed she was thirty-nine--"and looking fifty," remarked the searcher.
There were no pictures of men in the flat, just one of her mother, one of them both on vacation by some lake, and one of her apparently deceased father in the uniform of the customs service. If there was any man in her life, it appeared to be Mozart.
"She's an opera buff, and that's all," the neviot team leader reported back to Barzilai, after the flat had been left exactly as they found it.
"There's a big collection of LP records--she hasn't gotten around to compact disks yet--and they're all opera. Must spend most of her spare cash on them. Books on opera, on composers, singers, and conductors. Posters of the Vienna Opera winter calendar, though she couldn't begin to afford a ticket."
"No man in her life, eh?" mused Barzilai. "She might fall for Pavarotti, if you can get him. Apart from that, forget it."
But Barzilai did not forget it. He recalled a case in London, long ago. A civil servant in Defence, real spinster type; then the Sovs had produced this stunning young Yugoslav ... even the judge had been sympathetic at her trial. That evening Barzilai sent a long encrypted cable to Tel Aviv.
By the middle of December, the buildup of the Coalition army south of the Kuwaiti border had become a great, inexorable tidal wave of men and steel. Three hundred thousand men and women of thirty nations stretched in a series of lines across the Saudi desert from the coast and westward for over a hundred miles.
At the ports of Jubail, Dammam, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai the cargo ships came in from the sea to disgorge guns and tanks, fuel and stores, food and bedding, ammunition and spares in endless succession. From the docks the convoys rolled west along the Tapline Road to establish the vast logistic bases that would one day supply the invading army.
A Tornado pilot from Tabuq, flying south from a feint attack on the Iraqi border, told his squadron colleagues he had flown over the nose of a convoy of trucks and then on to the tail of the line. At five hundred miles per hour, it had taken him six minutes to reach the end of the line of trucks fifty miles away, and they had been rolling nose to tail.
At Logistic Base Alpha one compound had oil drums stacked three high on top of each other, on pallets six feet by six, with lines between them the width of a forklift truck. The compound was forty kilometers by forty. And that was just for fuel.
Other compounds at Log Alpha had shells, rockets, mortars, caissons of machine-gun rounds, armor-piercing antitank warheads, and grenades. Others contained food and water, machinery and spares, tank batteries and mobile workshops.
At that time the Coalition forces were confined by General Schwarzkopf to the portion of desert due south of Kuwait. What Baghdad could not know was that before he attacked, the American general intended to send more forces across the Wadi al Batin and another hundred miles farther west into the desert, to invade Iraq itself, pushing due north and then east to take the Republican Guard in flank and destroy it.
On December 13 the Rocketeers, the 336th Squadron of the USAF Tactical Air Command, left their base at Thumrait in Oman and transferred to Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia. It was a decision that had been made on December 1.
Al Kharz was a bare-bones airfield, constructed with runways and taxi tracks but nothing else. No control tower, no hangars, no workshops, no accommodations for anyone--just a flat sheet in the desert with strips of concrete. But it was an airfield.
With amazing foresight, the Saudi government had commissioned and built enough air bases to host an air power totaling more than five times the Royal Saudi Air Force.
After December 1 the American construction teams moved in. In just thirty days a tented city capable of housing five thousand people and five fighter squadrons had been built.
Principal among the builders were the heavy engineers, the Red Horse teams, backed by forty huge electric generators from the Air Force. Some of the equipment came by road on low-loaders, but most by air.
They built the clamshell hangars, workshops, fuel stores, ordnance depots, flight and briefing rooms, operations rooms, control towers, store tents, and garages.
For the aircrew and ground crew they erected streets of tents with roadways between, latrines, bathhouses, kitchens, mess halls, and a water tower to be replenished by convoys of trucks from the nearest water source.
Al Kharz lies fifty miles southeast of Riyadh, which turned out to be just three miles beyond the maximum range of the Scud missiles in Iraq's possession. It would be home for three months to five squadrons: two of F-15E Strike Eagles--the 336th Rocketeers and the Chiefs, the 335th Squadron out of Seymour Johnson, who joined at this point; one of F-15C pure-fighter Eagles; and two of F-16 Falcon fighters.
There was a special street for the 250 female personnel in the wing; these included the lawyer, ground-crew chiefs, truck drivers, clerks, nurses, and two squadron intelligence officers.
The aircrew flew themselves up from Thumrait; the ground crew and other staff came by cargo airplane. The entire transshipment took two days, and when they arrived, the engineers were still at work and would remain so until Christmas.
Don Walker had enjoyed his time in Thumrait. Living conditions were modern and excellent, and in the relaxed atmosphere of Oman, alcoholic drinks were permitted within the base.
For the first time, he had met the British SAS, who have a permanent training base there, and other "contract officers" serving with the Omani forces of Sultan Qaboos.
Some memorable parties were held, members of the opposite sex were eminently datable, and flying the Eagles on feint missions up to the Iraqi border had been great.
Of the SAS, after a trip into the desert with them in light scout cars, Walker had remarked to the newly appointed squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner: "These guys are certifiably insane."
Al Kharz would turn out to be different from Thumrait. As the home of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia enforces strict teetotalism, as well as any exposure of the female form below the chin, excluding hands and feet.
In his General Order Number, One, General Schwarzkopf had banned all alcohol for the entire Coalition forces under his command. All American units abided by that order, and it strictly applied at Al Kharz.
At the port of Dammam, however, the American off-loaders were bemused by the amount of shampoo destined for the British Royal Air Force. Crate after crate of the stuff was unloaded, put onto trucks or C- 130 Hercules air-freighters, and brought to the RAF squadrons.
They remained puzzled that in a largely waterless environment, the British aircrew could spend so much time washing their hair. It was an enigma that would continue to puzzle them until the end of the war.
At the other side of the peninsula, on the desert base of Tabuq, which British Tornados shared with American Falcons, the USAF pilots were even more intrigued to see the British at sundown, seated beneath their awnings, decanting a small portion of shampoo into a glass and topping it up with bottled water.
At Al Kharz the problem did not arise--there was no shampoo. Conditions, moreover, were more cramped than at Thumrait. Apart from the wing commander, who had a tent to himself, the others from colonel on down shared on the basis of two, four, six, eight, or twelve to a tent, according to rank.
Even worse, the female personnel were out of bounds, a problem made even more frustrating by the fact that the American women, true to their culture and with no Saudi Mutawa--religious police--to see them, took to sun-bathing in bikinis behind low fences that they erected around their tents.
This led to a rush by the aircrew to commandeer all the hilux trucks on the base, vehicles with their chassis set high above the wheels. Only from the top of these, standing on tiptoe, could a real patriot proceed from his tent to the flight lines, passing through an enormous diversion to drive down the street between the female tents, and check that the women were in good shape.
Apart from these civic obligations, for most it was back to a creaking cot and the "happy sock."
There was also a new mood for another reason. The United Nations
had issued its January 15 deadline to Saddam Hussein. The declarations coming out of Baghdad remained defiant. For the first time it became clear that they were going to go to war. The training missions took on a new and urgent edge.
For some reason, December 15 in Vienna was quite warm. The sun shone, and the temperature rose.
At the lunch hour Fr鋟lein Hardenberg left the bank as usual for her modest lunch and decided on a whim to buy sandwiches and eat them in the Stadtpark a few blocks away from the Ballgasse. It was her habit to do this through the summer and even into the autumn, and for this she always brought her sandwiches with her.
On December 15 she had none. Nevertheless, looking at the bright blue sky above Franzis-kanerplatz and protected by her neat tweed coat, she decided that if nature was going to offer, even for one day, a bit of Altweibersommer--old ladies' summer, to the Viennese--she would take advantage and eat in the park.
There was a special reason she loved the small park across the Ring. At one end is the H黚ner Kursalon, a glass-walled restaurant like a large conservatory. Here during the lunch hour a small orchestra is wont to play the melodies of Strauss, that most Viennese of composers. Without being able to afford to lunch there, others can sit outside the enclosure and enjoy the music for free.
Moreover, in the center of the park, protected by his stone arch, stands the statue of the great Johann himself.
Edith Hardenberg bought her sandwiches at a local lunch-bar, found a park bench in the sun, and nibbled away while she listened to the waltz tunes.
"Entschuldigung." She jumped, jerked out of her reverie by the low voice saying "Excuse me." If there was one thing Miss Hardenberg would have none of, it was being addressed by a complete stranger. She glanced to her side.
He was young and dark-haired, with soft brown eyes, and his voice had a foreign accent. She was about to look firmly away again when she noticed the young man had an illustrated brochure of some kind in his hand and was pointing at a word in the text. Despite herself she glanced down. The brochure was the illustrated program notes for The Magic Flute.
"Please, this word--it is not German, no?" His forefinger was pointing at the word portitura.
She should have left there and then, of course, just gotten up and walked away. She began to rewrap her sandwiches.
"No," she said shortly, "it's Italian."
"Ah," said the man apologetically. "I am learning German, but I do not understand Italian. Does it mean the story, please?"
"No," she said, "it means the score, the music."
"Thank you," he said with genuine gratitude. "It is so hard to understand your Viennese operas, but I do love them so much."
Her fingers slowed in their flutter to wrap the remaining sandwiches and leave.
"It is set in Egypt, you know," the young man explained. Such nonsense, to tell her that, she who knew every word of Die Zauberfl鰐e.
"Indeed it is," she said. This had gone far enough, she told herself.
Whoever he was, he was a very impudent young man. Why, they were almost in conversation. The very idea. "The same as A飀a," he remarked, back to studying his program notes. "I like Verdi, but I think I prefer Mozart."
Her sandwiches were rewrapped; she was ready to go. She should just stand up and go. She turned to look at him, and he chose that moment to look up and smile. It was a very shy smile, almost pleading; brown spaniel eyes topped by lashes a model would have killed for.
"There is no comparison," she said. "Mozart is the master of them all."
His smile widened, showing even white teeth. "He lived here once. Perhaps he sat here, right on this bench, and made his music."
"I'm sure he did no such thing," she said. "The bench was not here then." She rose and turned.
The young man rose too and gave a short Viennese bow. "I am sorry I disturbed you, Fr鋟lein. But thank you for your help."
She was walking out of the park, back to her desk to finish her lunch, furious with herself. Conversations with young men in parks--whatever next? On the other hand, he was only a foreign student trying to learn about Viennese opera. No harm in that, surely. But enough is enough.
She passed a poster. Of course; the Vienna Opera was staging The Magic Flute in three days. Perhaps it was part of the young man's study course. Despite her passion, Edith Hardenberg had never been to an opera in the Staatsoper. She had, of course, roamed the building when it was open in the daytime, but an orchestra ticket had always been beyond her.
They were almost beyond price. Season tickets for the opera were handed down from generation to generation. A season's abonnement was for the seriously rich. Other tickets could be obtained only by influence, of which she had none. Even ordinary tickets were beyond her means. She sighed and returned to her work.
That one day of warm weather had been the end. The cold and the gray clouds came back. She returned to her habit of lunching at her usual cafe and at her usual table. She was a very neat lady, a creature of habit.
On the third day after the park she arrived at her table at the usual hour, to the minute, and half-noticed that the one next to her was occupied. There was a pair of student books--she did not bother with the titles--and a half-drunk glass of water.
Hardly had she ordered the meal of the day when the occupant of the table returned from the men's room. It was not until he sat down that he recognized her and gave a start of surprise. "Oh, Gr黶s Gott--again," he said.
Her lips tightened into a disapproving line. The waitress arrived and put down her meal. She was trapped. But the young man was irrepressible. "I finished the program notes. I think I understand it all now."
She nodded and began delicately to eat. "Excellent. You are studying here?"
Now why had she asked that? What madness had gotten into her? But the chatter of the restaurant rose all around her. What are you worrying about, Edith? Surely a civilized conversation, even with a foreign student, could do no harm? She wondered what Herr Gemuetlich would think. He would disapprove, of course.
The dark young man grinned happily. "Yes. I study engineering. At the Technical University. When I have my degree, I will go back home and help to develop my country. Please, my name is Karim." "Fr鋟lein Hardenberg," she said primly. "And where do you come from, Herr Karim?"
"I am from Jordan." Oh, good gracious, an Arab. Well, she supposed there were a lot of them at the Technical University, two blocks across the K鋜ntner Ring. Most of the ones she saw were street vendors, awful people selling carpets and newspapers at the pavement cafes and refusing to go away. The young man next to her looked respectable enough. Perhaps he came from a better family. But after all ... an Arab.
She finished her meal and signaled for the bill. Time to leave this young man's company, even though he was remarkably polite. For an Arab.
"Still," he said regretfully, "I don't think I'll be able to go." Her bill came. She fumbled for some schilling notes.
"Go where?" "To the opera. To see The Magic Flute. Not alone--I wouldn't have the nerve. So many people. Not knowing where to go, where to applaud." She smiled tolerantly. "Oh, I don't think you'll go, young man, because you won't get any tickets."
He looked puzzled. "Oh no, it's not that." He reached into his pocket and placed two pieces of paper on the table. Her table. Beside her bill. Second row of the orchestra. Within feet of the singers. Center aisle.
"I have a friend in the United Nations. They get an allocation, you know. But he didn't want them, so he gave them to me."
Gave. Not sold, gave. Beyond price, and he gave them away. "Would you," asked the young man pleadingly, "take me with you? Please?" It was beautifully phrased, as if she would be taking him.
She thought of sitting in that great, vaulted, gilded, rococo paradise, her spirit rising with the voices of the basses, baritones, tenors, and sopranos high into the painted ceiling above. ... "Certainly not," she said.
"Oh, I am sorry, Fr鋟lein. I have offended you." He reached out and took the tickets, one half in one strong young hand, the other half in the other, and began to tear.
"No." Her hand came down on his own before more than half an inch of the priceless tickets had been torn in half. "You mustn't do that." She was bright pink.
"But they are of no use to me." "Well, I suppose ..." His face lit up. "Then you will show me your Opera House? Yes?" Show him the Opera. Surely that was different. Not a date. Not the sort of dates people went on who ... accepted dates. More like a tour guide, really. A Viennese courtesy, showing a student from abroad one of the wonders of the Austrian capital. No harm in that ...
They met on the steps by arrangement at seven-fifteen. She had driven in from Grinzing and parked without trouble. They joined the bustle of the moving throng alive already with anticipatory pleasure.
If Edith Hardenberg, spinster of twenty loveless summers, were ever going to have an intimation of paradise, it was that night in 1990 when she sat a few feet from the stage and allowed herself to drown in the music. If she were ever to know the sensation of being drunk, it was
that evening when she permitted herself to become utterly intoxicated in the torrent of the rising and falling voices.
In the first half, as Papageno sang and cavorted before her, she felt a dry young hand placed on top of her own. Instinct caused her to withdraw her hand sharply. In the second half, when it happened again, she did nothing and felt, with the music, the warmth seeping into her of another person's blood-heat.
When it was over, she was still intoxicated. Otherwise she would never have allowed him to walk her across the square to Freud's old haunt, the Cafe Landtmann, now restored to its former 1890 glory. There it was the superlative headwaiter Robert himself who showed them to a table, and they ate a late dinner.
Afterward, he walked her back to her car. She had calmed down. Her reserve was reasserting itself. "I would so like you to show me the real Vienna," said Karim quietly. "Your Vienna, the Vienna of fine museums and concerts. Otherwise, I will never understand the culture of Austria, not the way you could show it to me."
"What are you saying, Karim?" They stood by her car. No, she was definitely not offering him a lift to his apartment, wherever it was, and any suggestion that he come home with her would reveal exactly what sort of a wretch he really was. "That I would like to see you again."
"Why?" If he tells me I am beautiful, I will hit him, she thought.
"Because you are kind," he said. "Oh." She was bright pink in the darkness. Without a further word he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he was gone, striding away
across the square. She drove home alone.
That night, Edith Hardenberg's dreams were troubled. She dreamed of long ago. Once there had been Horst, who had loved her through that long hot summer of 1970 when she was nineteen and a virgin. Horst, who had taken her chastity and made her love him. Horst, who had walked out in the winter without a note or an explanation or a word of farewell.
At first she had thought he must have had an accident, and she called all the hospitals. Then that his employment as a traveling salesman had called him away and he would call. Later, she learned he had married the girl in Graz whom he had also been loving when his rounds took him there.
She had cried until the spring. Then she took all the memories of him, all the signs of his being there, and burned them. She burned the presents and the photos they had taken as they walked in the grounds and sailed on the lakes of the Schlosspark at Laxenburg, and most of all she burned the picture of the tree under which he had loved her first, really loved her and made her his own. She had had no more men.
They just betray you and leave you, her mother had said, and her mother was right. There would be no more men, ever, she vowed.
That night, a week before Christmas, the dreams ebbed away before the dawn, and she slept with the program of The Magic Flute clutched to her thin little bosom. As she slept, some of the lines seemed to ease away from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. And as she slept, she smiled. Surely there was no harm in that.